Asymmetric Integration and Legitimacy Rupture in Agricultural Supply Chains: A Case for Mutualised Retail Pathways

Agricultural supply chains in advanced economies increasingly show patterns of structural coercion while operating inside formally competitive, regulated markets. Farmers face declining bargaining power, rising cost exposure and chronic viability stress; retailers consolidate scale, data advantage and pricing authority. These dynamics are usually explained by market concentration, contract asymmetry or regulatory insufficiency. Those explanations are incomplete. Applying the legitimacy--grievance--trajectory framework of Ghadamian, this paper diagnoses the Australian agricultural supply chain as a case of asymmetric institutional integration: upstream producers are structurally absorbed into downstream retail systems without reciprocal governance, capital alignment or legitimacy participation. The result is a predictable legitimacy rupture — farmers remain formally independent while becoming functionally captive, generating grievance that price negotiation, transparency initiatives and policy intervention cannot resolve. â­ Prevailing repair strategies fail for one reason, and this paper's contribution is to give it: codes of conduct, competition enforcement, voluntary transparency and episodic intervention all operate within the architecture that produces the rupture, so they stabilise it rather than correcting it. adds the mechanism the framework already supplies and the source does not use — repair improves conditions on average across a chain whose burden is concentrated upstream, and average improvement leaves a concentrated-burden regime where it was. The paper then introduces mutualised retail pathways as a pre-solution architectural category: a reconfiguration of integration boundaries that does not presuppose policy reform, market exit or adversarial redistribution. âš ï¸ checks the four functions such a pathway must perform against a structure designed on this paper — a proposal, not a deployment — and reports that it satisfies one, inverts another, and falls short of the one carrying the legitimacy claim. The check also corrected the requirement: that function had been specified as a concession lists among those that cannot be obtained, and is restated here in a bounded form that a counterparty could accept without ceasing to be one.